More Awesome Than You!

This is a technical problem, but hopefully someone here will know what the cause is.  I don't know if it's my monitor (which is quite old) or my video card.  Basically, the entire screen is green, or varying shades of green.  I can see other colours, but not properly and anything that's meant to be white is green.  It's also giving me eye-strain looking at it.  I'd noticed it flashing green on & off a few times recently, then last night when I clicked on a link in a thread here to view a video, it went totally green and won't come back normal. 

Anyone any ideas? 

Sounds like your CRT is going out.  I had this problem with a monitor I had that wasn't even that old.  It would turn yellow at times, and my friend told me that the picture is displayed using three colors of light:  blue, green, and red.  The problem was with the blue, and when it would go out, that would leave the green and red.  Green and red light makes yellow.  So white sections in my display would appear yellow, and everything had a yellow cast to it.  I tried playing with filters on my graphics card, but the only thing that worked was getting a new monitor.  If you have access to another monitor or if you are able to hook your PC up to a friend's monitor, you can see for sure if this corrects the problem, but I'm willing to bet that is what the problem is, especially since you said your monitor was quite old.

The good news is, you can get flat-screens fairly cheaply now!  Why not put in an urgent request to Santa!

Unfortunately, Santa only has the scrapings at the bottom of his sack left when he visits this house and this year he probably won't have anything more than a picture of a monitor cut out of a magazine.

Anyway, here is a picture of what it looks like in-game.  The worst colours affected are white & blue, which turn yellowy-green and green respectively.  On my Sims account desktop, the background colour is dark turquoise instead of pale turquoise, but the icons are the same apart from the folder ones, which are washed-out yellow instead of bright yellow (the same as in the control bars in the picture).  In the game, hair colours are unaffected apart from elder, which is yellowy-white; pink is slightly darker than normal (see flamingos), but red & orange are unaffected.  You can see how green the control panel and icons are, instead of the usual blue, and also the status bar colours are different.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v734/jools1953/Weird%20Town/sample.jpg)

Hmm, looks fine to me.  I think it's your monitor.  Sounds exactly like the problem I was having.  I'll bet if you hook it up to a different monitor, it will look just fine.

Check out www.pricewatch.com, it turned up some 17-inch monitors.  I wouldn't recommend going less than that.  I paid about $400 for my ViewSonic 17-inch monitor about 7 years ago, but they've come down a LOT since then, especially with the new LCD monitors.  My sister got one of those, and it looks nice, but it had a big price tag.

To give my two sense worth, which isn't much but I agree with rainbow it is your monitor and its ot worth having it repaired you will more than likely find that its just easier to get a new one when you get a chance.  It won't do any damage to anything other than your poor eyes, I myself looked at purple in place of white for about six months.  Finally my Santa got tired of hearing me complain that colors just didn't look right and it hurt my eyes.

Old CRT monitors are pretty cheap. Try to buy one on eBay from those wussies who want crappy blurry LCDs instead.

Hit your monitor. Hard. If this doesn't fix it, try again. If that doesn't fix it, get a new monitor. And, like JM said, CRT monitors are pretty cheap, especially if you get a used one. They have crisper, truer colors than LCD screens, and less lag time between what's actually happening and what you're seeing (although this probably won't be noticable with anything you're doing). The tradeoff is in the amount of space they occupy.

I'm all for CRTs, personally. I hate it how LCDs, at least the ones I've seen, look crappy on most resolutions, how fonts go all weird and such. I don't mind the space a CRT monitor takes if the picture quality is better. I'm anal about my graphics, yes.

Does the problem only affect the Sims, or is it the same when you are in windows?

It's the same in Windows - as I said, it affects my desktop as well.  This page is a horrid sort of pale pea-green, it's really yucky.  The icons are the normal colours, although the smileys are orange rather than yellow. 

Oddly enough, it just dawned on me as I was loading the site that the picture would probably look normal to everyone else - duh!!!  At least that would suggest it IS the monitor, because if it was the graphics card presumably everyone else would have seen the same colours I was seeing.  I think.  Incidentally, it was clicking on a link here to see a video that sent it like this.  It had flashed green a few times before and gone straight back, but when I clicked on this link it asked me to download Windows Media Player (which I already have the latest version of) and said it had downloaded it (which it hadn't, it was only a few seconds doing it), then it went permanently green.  That makes me wonder if just maybe Media Player is causing it, but it seems highly unlikely.  In any case, I've noticed that when I try to change the colours, there are 3 'modes' that normally make the screen change to different versions in terms of brightness.  Now they make no difference at all, apart from the screen flashing slightly as if it's trying to change but can't.  They're all on 100 (maximum) as are both brightness and contrast.  Sounds like the colour changing facility or whatever it is has gone kaput.  I know tv screens go all green when the tube is on its way out, but I don't think monitors have tubes.

I'm not sure what a LCD monitor is, but if you mean a flat screen I definitely won't be getting one of those, partly because they're too expensive but also because I like a top to my monitor to put things on.  My speakers need to go on there for a start, and the webcam, plus my little knick-knacks.  There are a couple of places here that sell reconditioned monitors (they had one on Ebay for £1 that I actually bought once, but no one could collect it for me so I lost it).  I will do a search and see what I can find.  I can't put up with this for much longer, that's for sure.  Now if it had been purple, I'd have been quite happy, but I HATE green.

Isn't there an option somewhere in DXDiag for testing your monitor?  Or somewhere in the windows System Tools?

One thought does occur, though, that if, like me, you have a cat, your monitor may be choked with cat hair and giving it a good vacuum might help.   

On a more technical level, my old monitor has all kinds of facilities for adjusting settings, so maybe yours does too, if not actually on the monitor, then it may be that you can find it in the Control Panel.

Yes, monitors have tubes, just like TVs.  CRT stands for "cathode ray tube," which is the same thing TVs have, at least the older standard models.  That's what takes up all that room in your monitor sticking out the back.  The new monitors and TVs that are "flat panel" are usually the LCD type, which stands for "liquid crystal display."  These are used in laptops and watches mostly, but the newer monitors and TVs are using them now.  That's why they cost so much.  The problem with LCD monitors is that they look great at their "native" resolution, but if you change it to anything else, it looks horrible. 

In case you didn't know, the resolution is how big things appear on your screen.  Higher resolutions allow more room to display text, icons, and other things on your monitor, but it makes them smaller.  Lower resolutions make text easier to read and show bigger icons, but they can cause things to be crowded on your monitor screen.  You will have to scroll a lot more, maybe even having to scroll sideways at times to see a whole picture or webpage.  Having a bigger monitor allows you to enjoy a higher resolution with less eye strain.  That's why I could never go back to a 15-inch monitor. 

I hope this information is useful.  If you have any questions about anything I've said, let me know and I'll try to make it clearer. :)

I have a 17 inch LCD too, and the difference for anyone who gets migraine-type symptoms from too much time on the computer is quite noticeable.  And I find the resolution it's set at now works fine.  (But my reading glasses do enlarge everything!)

The space occupied is not such a big deal, since you gain a surface: LCD monitors are too thin to stack things on top of, but a CRT monitor is hefty enough that your deskspace can be reclaimed by stacking objects on top of the monitor. Get one that is nice and blocky, not one of those crappy "curvy" ones.

But for people like me, with arthritis, who live alone and therefore have to shift stuff themselves, at least an LCD is easy to move!  But Ancient, if you have to get the best deal, then a CRT makes sense, even a second hand one would probably give you a couple of years to save the pennies towards whatever is the latest thing in 2008!

Maybe if you got more exercise, you wouldn't be such a wuss. Also, drink fish oil. Drink lots of fish oil.

Personally, I like my LCD screen. It is something about the screen that makes it more... radiant. Colors seem to be much more brighter on it. CRT monitors seem to lack that radiance.

But hey, that is just my taste.

huh..whats exercise? :P

Wow. Now I know why JMPescado doesn't leave is bunker. He can't get past the massive piles of stuff. I have a sudden vision of a small rainforest growing amongst computers and military equipment.

Haha, that's good. :D

Fish oil is disgusting!  Even my cat would turn his pedigree nose up at it!

It's what you get when you lift your drink to your mouth or get up to go to the bathroom.

Oh, well I get plenty of that!

Hey Pescado was actually giving you good advice.  Fish oil is known to reduce inflammation, and arthritis is an inflammatory disease.  Inflammation is also associated with a whole host of diseases including heart disease, so it's good for more than just your joints.  There can't be enough good said about fish oil. (Do a search for arthritis and fish oil you'll see)

You'd need large doses for it to be effective.  You also need pharmaceutical grade stuff, not the capsules you can buy at the pharmacy.  That can be loaded with contaminants and is often rancid to boot.   The good stuff needs to be kept refrigerated and has a very short shelf life.  The good news however is that it's not your mother's cod liver oil.  It doesn't taste fishy at all.  You can even get it in a peach or lemon flavor.  Of course Pescado will probably say that's for wusses :D

Huh, sorry for the tangent.  Try to fiddle with your monitor's settings.  There might be a reset button.  Also try the degauss if you have one.  Hitting it also works, but that's usually for fixing that high pitch whine :D  I'd have to agree with everyone that your monitor might be on it's last err tube.

 

First I have to persuade my GP that my arthritis is real and not the general aches and pains associated with underactive thyroid (which if the substitute synthetic thyroxin used in the UK was any good you wouldn't get!) - even though the hospital x-rayed my neck to find out why my little finger was numb and bent inwards, and found I had arthritis there.  (They also x-rayed my shoulder and elbow and subsequently found a trapped nerve).

Anti-inflammatories are good for taking the pain away for a while, but they don't stop the joint deterioration, they may slow it down a little, I don't know, but unless they can reverse the damage, I just have to live with it.

Considering you submitted a picture that looks green to you and fine to us, I would think it has to be your monitor.

I had a monitor blow a 'tube' and everything turned lime green, (no red = green screen?)
Mine was still under warranty, so I have no idea what it cost to fix (it was fixed, not replaced) but if it helps, that same monitor still works 9 years later with no further repairs

I think of LCD the same way I think of laptops, possibly more convenient, but not my preference. For $50Can, I got a refurbished 19" real monitor (½ the size of my car and about the same weight) at the same computer shop I got my tower.

I have to admit I do use my computer as surface area as well, my apartment is far too small for single function items.

When you all put stuff on top of your monitor, just be sure not to block the vents in the back.  These vents are what keep your monitor from getting too hot.  Blocking these vents is very bad...it could cause a fire.

Not if you store it with the liquid nitrogen, it doesn't.

I recently had to replace my monitor when the display began widening itself until the start key could no longer be seen or accessed by mouse.  I was going to go purchase a new CRT (for less than $100) and mentioned it to a friend.  She just happened to have a spare monitor hanging around the house and I got it for free.  Interestingly, I gave a spare monitor away a few months ago myself.

The long story short is: ask around.  Maybe someone you know has a monitor they don't want and would love to get out of their house!

Failing that, some local radio stations do swap shops, so if you have something you don't want, you could try swapping it for a monitor.

My ex picked up three 17-inch monitors from work when they upgraded their PCs, and there wasn't really anything wrong with them.  He used one for his workbench, when people gave him PCs to work on, he just hooked them up to it and a spare mouse and keyboard.  I think we gave the other one away, and the third one he used when his monitor went out.

I love my 17-inch flat screen LCD monitor but it's not so great now that my young (autistic) son has found that scratching it is a neat way to make pictures  >:( I'm tempted to go back to CRT just to have a more impervious glass surface. What with the scratches on the screen, uncorrected astigmatism, eye floaters, and general late-night bleariness, it's a wonder I can see anything on this screen at all.    :P

Is it possible to get a new screen and then put some kind of lockable guard over it when you aren't using it?  Maybe something made from a hard clear plastic that you wouldn't need to remove if you just wanted to log on for a few minutes?